Uh we do that in our district. We do that in our classrooms. We do that when students walk in. We see them hungry. We see that they need a hug. We we do we feed them. We hug them. We make sure they're taken care of. Finance department makes some good sound decisions based upon data driven decisions. The data that's available. OTL makes some good sound data driven decisions. uh human resources make some good data decision decisions uh through uh was checking references uh looking at resumes and thus now there's two different pieces of information here that uh are drives our data here at CSK uh it often gets overlooked um almost always if not always um what we have is um Mrs. is Bojek, thanks so much for being my assistant. Uh um this is this is last year's I uh scores. Uh as a matter of fact, and our Illinois science assessments.
So we will wrap up our third cohort and then um we will head over to the music center to do rehearsals and set everything up. So, um, really, really, really excited. And that's all I have for tonight. Thank you. Uh, legislative update. Well, it's over. Yay. Um, all in fact, no. Yeah, it it u So, the the quick version is that they passed a budget at 1:00 a.m. on the last day. I think it's April 24th, 25th. Um, and nobody really know knew what was going to happen until the very last minute and they put a bunch of stuff in the budget bill at the very last minute. They've never had a public hearing. Um, however, I mean, on our side, uh, schools got a 2% increase and that is not what we wanted, but it's not nothing. So, we're okay with that. We do think inflation will go up more than that.
And um yeah, so I'm excited about that. And then overall um this year we've kind of embraced productive struggle um and made that a priority. We were noticing that postco we were helping kids too much. Um we you know when we came back from co a lot of kids couldn't write because they didn't get those essential skills. They just were very out of practice with a lot of things. We helped a lot and then we've been slowly, you know, backing up but really not fast enough. Um, so helping too much and some kids really have blossomed since we took that concerted effort to talk about productive struggle with the kids. Um, it's embedded in the math curriculum already. So that's fantastic. Um, and it's also comfort level with the teachers. Um, and knowing that when I walk in the room, I'm not expecting them to be helping someone.
So um just a few questions from the board. Um I I have a few I'm sure other board members um is what what's going to be what's going to happen if a resident if it's if you have a lockout you know during like let's say 1000 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. about jumping over the fence. What's So I mean it's a six foot high fence. Um so I mean sure anyone can get over anything if they're determined. Um so the six foot high fence is the first deterrent. If somebody does get a ladder or jump the fence somehow, um there will be cameras of that person. Now, getting them out, my guess is we'd have residents calling our management. And we have uh we right now we don't have management that's going to live on site. We do have management uh that lives over just about seven, eight minutes away at the Buckley in Framingham that could uh usually is on call that could get there uh relatively quickly.
Land Associates will continue to be one of our architects of record. Uh on page seven, top of page seven, United Federated Systems, obviously continues to be our security and alarm services contractor. And then on page seven and to page eight, we have our HVAC preventive maintenance vendor, which is Express Air, who's been with us for the better part of 10 years. Middle of page eight, uh we continue to maintain our athletic field. We have four maintenance sessions each and every year. We continue to do that. The field continues to be in pretty good shape. Uh they believe we have about another two to three years of shelf life on the on the field in regard to they do concussion tests and they do several other tests in regard to the give of the field. So probably in the next year or two we may start to uh have the potential to go out to uh to bid in regard to a new surface on the field.
Um, I don't know how he does it cuz he's down there 24/7 working with these kids in that lab. Um, but just some highlights from our race because I think we've kind of bypassed that a little bit. Our car broke down the day we got down there and all these individuals huddled around each other and I me and Mr. Lefront sat back and watched because we're not allowed to help and they figured it out and the even the judges were impressed. Everyone was impressed. In fact, I had a meeting with him Benergy this morning and because it's a solar car, I have actually been able to recruit five solar companies that now want to invest in this team. So they are they are the only rural SARS solar car team in the state of Arizona. They're the only ones. Everyone else has got a what a 20 $30,000 $40,000 budget.
Suhee Garcia, Amelia Guyire, Marisol Ernnandez, Indigo Martinez, Marina Ranel, Valeria Venzas, and Samuel Sepeda. Yeah, I think we should go on the D and then the kids right here. So we can like that. Let me know how I micro. Thank you. No bunny ears here. No bunny ears. Does that work? I think that works. Let me see. Let's get everybody in. Perfect. Thank you. And don't move. This one's for me. Do you want to get in there? Yeah. just has to back up. Before we move on, I I want to share one quick story because I think it it shows the character of the students who participate in our kids congress program. Um Valyria, who was not able to be here tonight, but Dr. Dupin read her name was not able to join us at Camelback High School for the program. But I think the reason why she wasn't with us is incredibly powerful.
And so we have that available knowing that that's going to happen. We just don't know when or how much it'll be. So we want to be prepared for that. So unfortunately because of the environment with interest rates, we have been able to increase our budget balance carry forward because of interest earnings. So the last, let's see, we're expecting to have over another million dollars worth of interest earnings, which again gives us more flexibility in the future to be able to meet our ongoing uners capital needs. Thank you. This may sound like an amateur question, so I'm sorry, but um just lack of experience. When it comes to those unexpected costs, do we have a list out there that we could see of how much those generally cost and how much we need to have in savings for contingency? So the $5 million is an educated guess to hold along with the fact that uh even right now um Albert and I are going through asset planner and determining those the next 5 years worth of the most urgent needs, scrutinizing them very clearly, very carefully uh so that we can identify those um and then plan actually a budget over the next three years to get those most urgent items planned for and not have to go into contingency.
Now, some of you on this board have been asking for a long time like what's happened to CSK students over the years, right? Uh what's the longitudinal data and how have we been outperforming or performing or underperforming other students within the district? I I'm not too sure if I've ever heard the results to that. Uh but this is last year. uh we've outscored every other all other four of the elementary schools last year and by some measures uh quite substantially. This was the year before. We once again have outscored every other elementary school within this district and as you can see sometimes quite substantially. Let's go one year back. This is yet again. This is us against the rest of the district. Now, you might say, "Why do you say that? That sounds so confrontational. We've never been presented. We've never been represented the way that we feel like we ever should have been.
And I do just want to add to that. I think people hear 2% increase. Um, it's not really a % increase because they have moved all curricular fees back into our a foundation grant instead of a line by line. So, we've got to take $160 times each kid that we have and subtract that from our foundation. Right. So, I do think it's misleading a little bit because people hear 2% and like we got new money. We didn't. Yeah. Well, we didn't lose it. No, we didn't. Um, but it is right. It is not. It's not really enough, but it's also not flatlined, which was also a risk that that was there at the end when the state had a $2 billion shortfall in the last week of the session. So, um, but right, there was a big issue about having a separate line for curricular materials so everybody could see here are the curricular materials and then here is, you know, what goes in the education fund.
So, um, we've seen huge growth in especially the kiddos that we did it for. Um, which is awesome and hopefully we'll just continue to work on that next year because really what we want them to do it independently. Um, this is a nice way of saying do it yourself. And also I think kids really have less experience with struggling with persevering in our world today. Um, so more outside more more struggle. Okay. Thank you. my turn. All right.
Um, but usually it's self-reporting and if someone does it, they'll get in in trouble and right, you know, either I'm not sure the whole process for enforcement, whether it's fines and then later if it happens multiple times eviction due to non-compliance with rules, but that's a whole housing matter. Okay. And then um one other thing um which I'm going to ask you to do also, could you reach out to um the police and fire chiefs um a lot of the other apartment complexes in town um what they've done is they've given them a list of the police officer and firefighters door access cards. So in the event they have to get into those buildings immediately or have some kind of access code for them to get in. We we we actually have that cuz we have the same system on the entire building. So they went say they they have access to basically every door on the entire site.
But right now it feels in very good shape. Concussion testing from uh the end of last year was excellent. We do another one before the I call them the contact sports soccer and football. We do it at in the end of August and I'll give the board an update on that score. But last year the score was very good. On the bottom of page eight, we still continue to use Zoro Zonar. They do all our GPS tracking for our 25 to 26 buses. And on the top of page nine, uh we are using school health to service and maintain all our AEDs. We have 22 AEDs defibrillators throughout our district. Mr. for P Forfeido heads that up and uh does a nice job with that. Uh in the middle of the page uh we are going to also have a new architect of record called we call them ENV which is actually doing some work for us now in regard to the cafeteria ENV architects.
We did it with 5,000 or less using a car that we knew had problems. Um, but they figured it out and at the end of the day they won the endurance and they won rookie of the year because out of all the teams that they were playing around with, this is the team that stuck together like glue. Uh, they huddled together, they moved together, they figured out problems together. Um, and I want to commend my son. He did an amazing job of of leading. But I I found that there were multiple leaders in this group. So, next year, what I want the school board to be aware of is that we are going to get an entry- level car. Uh, it's it's another investment that I found a sponsor for. Uh it's about $2,500 there. And this is for our freshman, uh Khloe, who's coming up out of junior high.
She had the option to serve on the interview panel for the new Lom Melinda principal. and she felt that it was a bigger responsibility for her to make certain that the new principal at the school that she was leaving um was going to be somebody who was going to take care of her fellow students that were in younger grades so that way she was leaving a legacy for them um of continued success and support. And so, um, I just share that because like my heart breaks cuz I would have loved for her to be there, but it's so filled with pride and joy that she has that type of leadership mindset. And, you know, all of the students we've recognized today, we've seen that level of leadership from them throughout the program. And parents that are in the room, you I am so proud. I just want you to know that you have every reason to be proud of your students.
So, um yeah, we're hoping the contingency of 5 million will be enough, but it is based upon Albert's and my experience and generally and then also making sure that we're budgeting for those most urgent needs at the beginning of every school year. So, you'll hear more when we propose the budget. um in the first first meeting in June. So there'll be list of items with how much they generally cost as far as you know things that have popped up in the you know we had our conversation. So I like I like to look at the past. So in the past like five years how often do we have these things pop up and how much do they generally cost? So we can know kind of You bet. In fact, uh we just had gone through the process of updating our asset planner with all of the projects that had been completed after 2023 with the actual costs of all those items, what we actually paid for it.
We almost become a wallflower." This is us. We've outperformed substantially more than every other school in the district. Can we go there next year? Now, I got to give it to Monae because they edged us out on the Illinois science assessment and boy, we took that personally. Okay. Uh they uh but in the other two tests, we outscored the other schools in the district and might I say in most in substantially in 2019 for ELA and and the math, CSK has outperformed the rest of the district. Now, I can't pretend that everything is peaches and cream, right? because Mooney edged us out in 2018. So, I'm not going to say that. I'm not going to hide the data, but kudos to them. They did a great job. If we go to the year prior, I was able to get a uh uh just the overall meets and exceeds and Mo once again p pulling pulling ahead of us.
Um but they chose to put it all in there together again to give a bit of a misleading number to say that um how much schools would be getting. So um that added to the um property tax bill that was SB1 um which we've been you know just starting to learn the impacts of both of those. Um there were a number of other bills related to curriculum um and that type of thing that were passed, but I think again it the most important parts for us are just about the budget. And so um anyway, that's that's all I got. And um you know I I most bills don't take effect until July 1st. So there's generally this period of time in which everybody kind of can adjust if we need to change things. Um you know, we could be ready for July 1 and Thank you.
So, good afternoon everyone. Um, it's going to be a little bit short. First of all, I do apologize that it wasn't the last meeting, but it's been it's been great coming back in. Um, couple things I just want to bring up. I know this Saturday is the town meeting. Um, I was able to attend um least last week on behalf of the region.
This latch system works the same as every other front door, back door, every door on the building. Okay. So they'll be able to get in whenever they need to. Yes. Okay.